Okroshka Recipe with Kvass, Fresh Cucumbers and Ham

Step-by-step recipe

1. Cold soups are made from ready-to-eat foods and vegetables that need no cooking. So once the vegetables are boiled, the herbs chopped and all the ingredients prepared, all that's left is to mix everything and pour over your liquid of choice: bread or beet kvass, ayran, soured milk and so on.
   
2. Bake the potatoes, preferably last year's crop, any way you like. The easiest is to prick them with a knife and bake them in the microwave for 8-12 mins. Once they have cooled, peel them.
3. Hard-boil the eggs, cool them under cold running water and peel them straight away, as for egg salad. Separate the whites from the yolks into different bowls.
4. Wash all the vegetables that won't be cooked and pat them dry with a towel. Chop the fresh vegetables, or rather dice them finely. The pieces should be roughly the size you'd cut for Olivier salad, or a little smaller. If you prefer, you can leave the cucumbers unpeeled.
5. You can replace the ham with lean pork boiled until tender, but ham is better. Cut the meat into small cubes.
   
6. Spring onions: use only the green part. Chop them finely with a knife, mix with 1-2 pinches of salt and mash with a fork so the onions release their juice. By the way, many cold soups benefit greatly from mashed spring onions.
   
7. Mix the egg yolks with 1 tsp of sugar and 1-2 tsp of prepared homemade mustard, then mash with a fork into a smooth paste. The mustard gives okroshka a gentle kick, which makes the cold soup taste much better. Chop the dill very finely, leaves only: the stems are better left out, as they are tough and unappetising.
   
8. In a large pot, combine the chopped vegetables: potatoes, radishes and cucumber. Add the ham or meat, the chopped hard-boiled egg whites and the dill.
   
9. Thin the yolk and mustard mixture with a little bread kvass. Pour it over the vegetables. Add the mashed spring onions as well.
   
10. Pour cold bread kvass over all the vegetables. If your kvass is bottled, let it stand open for a while, otherwise the cold soup will foam. Adjust the sharpness of the okroshka to taste simply by adding mustard and salt. Add pepper if you like.
    
11. For okroshka to be truly refreshing, it has to be very cold. Put the pot in the fridge for a few hours.
12. Ladle the cold soup into a bowl, add a dollop of sour cream and serve with a slice of the freshest bread. Everyone can add more dill to their own bowl, which is very welcome, and if the bread kvass is quite sweet, a little heat too: mustard or grated homemade horseradish.
    
13. Cold soups are a path to creativity. In the old days, okroshka was made with all sorts of meat: beef, pork, chicken, turkey, hazel grouse, quail and plenty of other exotic things. There was also fish okroshka, mushroom okroshka and mixed versions. Okroshka used to contain a lot of meat or fish, sometimes more than half of the total volume.
    
14. In Europe, cold soups are mostly made to much simpler recipes and with a fermented milk base. But those are completely different dishes: their job is to refresh, not to fill you up.